I grabbed the message: ‘Call Phil on this number . . .’
I dialled ‘this number’, and a friendly, enthusiastic Brummie voice answered: ‘Yeah, I really liked the tape. You were doing some mad melody ideas. A bit like Arthur Brown.’
It was 3 p.m. By 6.30 I had found my way to the studio. It was homemade in a garage. Lined with egg boxes and foam it was Abbey Road as far as I was concerned. For a small pro-am studio it was quite well equipped. It had a small drum kit in situ, and lots of cables, pedals and stands to weave past on the way to the vocal booth. I had no idea about recording. I understood what a tape recorder did, and I understood a bit of what a mixer did (mix, right?), but of multitrack recording, I had no clue.
The idea of headphones was totally new; a monitor mix was an undiscovered country.
Phil played me the backing track. The guitar was pretty cool as well, I thought: a little bit Peter Green, early Fleetwood Mac, ‘The Green Manalishi’ feel. The song was called ‘Dracula’, and it had some corny Carry On/‘Fangs for the Memories’-style lyrics, but played absolutely deadpan serious. Try ‘My only sense of humour is in a jugular vein’ and ‘Your neck is on the menu tonight’ as a taster and you get the idea. I started to sing, having learnt the song in the control room. Phil leaned forward and pushed the talkback button: ‘Erm . . . how long have you got?’
‘All night if you want,’ I replied.
I could see him leaning back to dial a phone number.
Phil played bass and had called his big brother, Doug, who played drums. Together, we all listened back at four in the morning. I had never double-tracked, or harmonised with myself, but I did that night: three-part ascending choir vocals, big doubled choral pieces. If only the owner of the three-bedroomed semi whose garage it was knew what he started that night.
‘We’d better start the band, then, I suppose,’ said Doug.
I was most impressed by the fact that they had a battered blue transit van. It performed parcel deliveries by day, and at night it would turn into the most exotic four-wheeled magic carpet, transporting our merry souls to la-la land until dawn, when we all went back to the pumpkin patch with the rest of humanity. But before we could sprinkle fairy dust into that petrol tank, we had to find a guitarist.
So an ad was put in Melody Maker: ‘Guitarist wanted for pro recording band. Good prospects.’
My God, I came over all a twitter. Pinch yourself, Dickinson, here comes the Big Time.
Dope Opera
Speed was not so speedy anymore. We had all moved and were spread across East London. Varying degrees of work plus geography put paid to us, and in any case our drummer couldn’t get off from his job in Catford. Plumstead became Glumstead as we played our last gig, but not before a puzzled audience saw me disembowel Snoopy on the stage at the People’s Palace. I knew they were puzzled because I could clearly see the bemusement on the six faces in the cavernous venue. Perhaps they thought they had encountered a strange art installation, or they were simply so appalled that they stayed to see the car crash.
Actually, we weren’t that bad – just not that good.
Doug and Phil lived in a rather swish rented mansion block in Battersea in south-west London. In the seventies – and the eighties, for that matter – rents in London were affordable, and houses were cheap. One enterprising lad on a social-sciences course actually bought a flat during his time at university, using his grant as a deposit. Smart cookie.
I did something quite different with my grant money. I spent most of it on a PA system for the new band. It consisted of two large pieces of furniture with 2 × 15-inch speakers buried in the cabinetry. Sat atop were a pair of integrated double 12 inches with a tweeter on top, powered by four 200-watt valve amplifiers, designated as slaves, powerslaves, in fact. I had upped the ante in the microphone stakes and now gripped a gold AKG-something-or-other, with a cannon plug at one end and a jack plug at the other. I was halfway to paradise at least.
All of which depleted my bank account to almost zero. The nice people at Barclays had given me a chequebook, a bank card and what seemed to be a free overdraft, which was how I fed myself. I was also responsible for not paying my rent. I managed this by not being present between the hours of nine and five, Monday to Friday, or if I was present, I hid behind the cooker.
After a couple of terms of this, letters started to arrive. Quite a lot of letters, really. Never mind, I thought. One day all of this will be in a book.
In the meantime I manned the telephone in the rather swish mansion block in Battersea and waited for prospective guitarists to phone. By day three I was losing the will to live. If auditioning disciples was like auditioning guitarists then no wonder Jesus ascended to heaven. At first I listened and they talked, and talked . . .
I had maybe a hundred names, and we booked them in over three days at a rehearsal studio above the Rose and Crown in Wandsworth. I made notes on their stories and their influences and styles.
‘Well, I think I’m as good as Jimmy Page, but maybe not as clever.’
‘I like to think of myself as a cross between Ritchie Blackmore and Mozart.’
‘I think the guitar is, for me, an extension of my entire personality.’
Phil and Doug just jammed on a couple of chords and we watched as the helpless, the hopeless, the hapless, the naive and the outright lunatic failed to negotiate any musical material or collaborate with any rhythm at all, not even their own pulse.
At the end of three days, and after nearly throwing myself off Albert Bridge into the Thames in frustration, two shiny nuggets appeared. Both were over 30, which seemed an impossibly distant age. There was a fantastic Irish guy who had played in showbands, a total pro. Music was like flicking on a light switch for him. But then in walked Tony Lee. Tony was a chilled-out Australian with presence, and when he played, which he did effortlessly, he gurned in a most-agreeable manner. He was 30 years ahead of his time as far as facial hair was concerned. In short, he looked great and, boy, could he play guitar.
We called ourselves Shots, but we could have called ourselves Anal Catastrophe and only had to change one letter. It was the era of punk, after all. I thought it was a rubbish name as well, but I couldn’t think of a better one.
We set about rehearsing material and creating an image. Not being experienced at either past-time, I went with the received wisdom. After rehearsals, or lengthy discussions over vats of tea in Battersea, I would bounce around trains, tubes and the 277 bus before arriving back at the Isle of Dogs.
One random night, I unsuspectingly fell under the evil spell not of bell, book and candle, but of glass, resin and matches. Marijuana had arrived, and in the finest tradition of toilet archaeology, shit was about to happen. I had been hammering on the keys of the dilapidated piano when there was a knock at the door.
Peering around the door handle was my grinning, pixie-faced flatmate, he of the Afghan coat and John Lennon specs.
‘Fancy a glass?’ he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about but, in the spirit of ‘What Does this Button Do?’, I feigned nonchalance.
‘Why not?’
I tentatively followed him into his lair. It was full-on hippy-headband, joss-stick heaven: carpets on the walls and ceiling – even on the floor. It was a male boudoir, and a temple to a fragrance I couldn’t quite identify. He giggled a lot. He was still giggling when he took a badge from his lapel (students always wore at least 10 or 15 badges) and laid it down, bending the sharp end of the pin to vertical. This was intriguing behaviour.
He then crumbled a piece of a brown mud-like substance away from its bigger brother, and rolled it into a greasy lump. He impaled it with great care on the badge like a surgeon would treat a fragile liver before transplant.
Suddenly he lit the lump, swooped a glass over the top of the whole issue and, lifting the edge of the inverted glass, inhaled the resulting smoke before going very red in the face. I was nonplussed. Finally, he exhaled. The glass was still full of the j
oys of combustion.
He nodded at the glass.
I inhaled to maximum effect. My lungs felt singed, my epiglottis ravaged by a Brillo Pad, but for some reason I rolled on my back, put my hands and feet in the air, and I was suddenly on the ceiling looking down at myself. I had a few more puffs, and by now had figured out that this was a resinous form of marijuana. Things became funny that were not so before, and I spent several hours perforating the fabric of the universe looking for the joke. Though I am loath to admit it, that little puff of dope opened what They Might Be Giants would have called the little ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’. That and a desire to eat doughnuts.
I never got the chance to thank my flatmate because the police arrived and took him away a few days later. He was a generous soul, and had sent a large lump of hash in the corner of an envelope via Her Majesty’s postal system. Whether impaired by his own fumes, or simply impaired in his judgement, he addressed the envelope to the wrong house. The recipient opened it, called the police and kindly gave them the name and address of the sender, helpfully provided within.
I think he was fined £400 and I never saw him again, but whatever was in that piece of dope had not gone away. My yearning was to transfer the theatre spinning through the cosmos of my brain into the very soul of an audience. But there was the problem of image. It was clear to me that I didn’t look the part. I also couldn’t bring myself to fall into the mire of the fake American rock ’n’ roller. Image in entertainment can be everything and nothing at the same time.
I had to be substantial. I had no choice, because judged on image I was a walk-on disaster. In case you think this judgement too harsh, there is a wealth of photographic evidence. Because the recording of ‘Dracula’ seemed to be in the right vein, we concocted a sort of pastiche Screaming Lord Sutch bargain-basement shock-horror band personality. Our lanky Australian wore a cape and a lot of eye shadow. Our bass player wore a rubber 80-year-old man mask and I wore green army long johns, boxing boots and a grandad shirt. The pièce de résistance was a gold lamé jockstrap. In case you think this may just have been a terrible accident during a game of blind man’s bluff in a charity shop, I had the gold jockstrap handmade.
Up in Hackney, East London, was a legal squat, basically a commune of three streets in a triangle. In the middle of it were all manner of vegan cafés and rainbow coalitions. There dwelt a lesbian seamstress who measured me up, somewhat unimpressed, and produced my sparkly willy-cover.
I had in mind Ian Anderson, he of the tramp overcoat and codpiece on Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. Although I didn’t sound like Ian Anderson vocally, I was a massive Jethro Tull fan, and of course Glenn Cornick, the founder of Wild Turkey, had been an original member.
I started to use my limited dramatic skills. A great deal of prancing went on in confined spaces during rehearsals, and twirling inanimate objects while standing on one leg.
Fast approaching was our first gig. The owner of the Rose and Crown took pity on us, I suspect because we spent a lot of money in his rehearsal room. There was one person in the audience and there is nothing quite so lonely as one man in a disco. He sat at a table in the middle of the dance floor, the blue flashing lights reflecting off the mirrored walls. No matter how many mirrors, it still didn’t look like a crowd.
More gigs followed, and our fame spread as far as Croydon. There, we suddenly came to the attention of an agent, who wanted to sign us. He made all the right noises but said all the wrong things.
He had red hair and a comb-over, and was an agent for rockabilly bands, fifties revival acts, Teddy-boy cover groups and any form of novelty to entertain awful people.
‘Brilliant, lads,’ he said. ‘Love it. Comedy heavy metal. Hilarious. Love the banter. Come up to the office and sign the contract.’
And then he was gone.
The office was on a damp-smelling first floor above a curry house in Finsbury Park, just around the corner from the tube and not too far from the Rainbow Theatre, a legendary rock venue (now sadly an evangelist church). That, of course, was where we really wanted to be, but this seemed better than nothing. We signed the contract. It said that we promised to do everything, and he promised to try to do something but with no guarantees.
‘Brilliant, lads. Fantastic, great, comedy heavy metal . . . bring the house down.’
We went away feeling strangely glum and unfulfilled.
After a few weeks of nothing in particular from this gentleman, we were offered a gig at an army base in Arbroath, Scotland. Research, plus a map, revealed the truth about economics espoused by Dickens: ‘When the petrol bill to drive from one end of the country exceeds the total fee available, result misery.’
Arbroath being notable for its smoked fish, I went down to the fishmongers and bought some boil-in-a-bag kippers to give us a taste of what might have been. Our agent protested: ‘Well, frankly lads, you’re blowing a great chance. Extremely disappointing.’
We consigned our agent with the Donald Trump comb-over to the bargain basement of history, and headed south-east, beyond even the mighty metropolis of Plumstead.
Gravesend is one of those town names, like Leatherhead or Maidenhead, which make Americans scratch their heads and wonder, Why? The why in this case was probably nautical and may have alluded to the end of the line for ships of the line. The Prince of Wales didn’t live there, but he certainly gave rise to a few pubs in his time, and Shots appeared one dull evening, setting up in front of the bar, with the gents’ toilet entrance just to one side of the non-existent stage.
Masks on, jockstrap firmly strapped and silver tambourine twirling away, we were enough to stop conversation at the bar, which is always a good start.
The big challenge came when patrons attempted to use the toilet facilities, and I decided to conduct a few improvised interviews with them as they stepped onto our territory. The more humiliating the better, and the landlord rebooked us.
Word got around about the prancing singer, the old geezer on the bass and the increasingly uncomfortable Tony Lee on black Gibson, black mascara, black lipstick and no work permit. As we returned to the scene of the crime weeks later the place was packed and then, after that, more packed. The landlord was delighted.
‘Love the banter,’ he’d say, ‘love it.’ And he would buy me lots of beer.
Summer of 1978 was, for me, stunning. I was free to roam the London streets with only dreams as my guide, and even then, the liberty to forget at will. I had resigned as entertainment officer, so I just pottered about the East End, getting a builder’s suntan.
Because of punk and its DIY attitude to records and record companies, everyone was in on the act now. Self-produced singles on vinyl were standard for rock bands too, but as Shots we were at a disadvantage. We didn’t have the cash to have one pressed. Tony, our Antipodean vampire, was showing signs of ultimatum fever. He was older, had actually earned money out of music and was in a reasonably tearing hurry to do so again.
Throughout my third and final year at university, we resumed our gigs in small pubs and clubs around London. We could have papered the walls of a small hamster cage with rejection slips for ‘Dracula’. The Prince of Wales was starting to get bored of us, and I think the feeling was mutual. There are only so many times you can try the same gags and the same songs before people begin to drift. One evening, however, we were out loading the van and I was standing, temporarily unused, when I was approached by three odd-looking individuals.
Paul Samson had a bowler hat, leather jacket and a moustache, plus shoulder-length hair in curls. He was not unlike a King Charles spaniel. Chris Aylmer was tall, had a mullet and seemed really quite mature. Barry Purkis had dyed red hair in ringlets, a Nazi-stormtrooper dress jacket, fluorescent earrings and bright-red trousers.
‘’Allo,’ started Paul. ‘We’re Samson. We’ve got a deal, an album and management, and we want a singer. Interested?’
‘Gary Holton, Heavy Metal Kids – that’s the sort of thing we’re after,’ chimed in Barry.
‘I can see the Ian Gillan influence,’ Chris intoned reflectively.
‘And Kiss, and the Residents. Mad shit,’ Barry added.
‘Mad,’ Chris muttered.
‘Yeah, mad,’ Paul chuckled.
‘Well, I am very flattered,’ I replied. ‘But I’ve got to finish my final exams in three weeks so I can’t do anything until I’ve got that over with. Is that okay?’
‘Yeah, alright. We’ll be in touch,’ Paul said, and he wrote down his phone number. I had become more and more preoccupied with exams, and for the six months before my finals had decided to catch up on the previous two-and-half-years of academic insufficiency.
With no wasted effort, I got a Desmond, a Tutu, or, more correctly, a second-class honours, lower division.
By the end of the exams I was starting to imagine that I was almost getting the hang of this academic business. My brain was creacking in all the right places, and I began to wonder if all this activity might have created some permanent impact.
I finished my last exam before lunch. I took a deep breath as I turned my back on the great white-fronted main building on the Mile End Road. I took the 277 bus down to the Greenwich foot tunnel and walked under the River Thames to the old wharves that lay on the south of the river. Wood Wharf Studios was a rehearsal room with a panoramic view of the water, but for today my destination was the small portable shed around the back.
Head still buzzing from cabinet papers about Munich, appeasement and the fall of France to the Nazis, I opened the studio door. It was 1979. I was 20 years old and I was about to start singing full-time with Samson.
A Heavy Metal Crusade
It was not quite what I expected. There was more gear than I had ever seen in a rehearsal room: Marshall amps, weave-fronted Marshall speaker 4 × 12-inch cabinets, Paul’s Gibson SG, Chris’s Fender Precision bass and, of course, the greatest number of drums I had ever been in close proximity to.
What Does This Button Do? Page 7
